maps – GISCafe Voicehttps://www10.giscafe.com/blogs/gissusan
Just another GIS Blogs weblogWed, 16 Aug 2017 16:47:33 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.79101652PufferSphere Makes the World Go Round with Spherical Displayshttps://www10.giscafe.com/blogs/gissusan/2017/08/10/puffersphere-makes-the-world-go-round-with-spherical-displays/
https://www10.giscafe.com/blogs/gissusan/2017/08/10/puffersphere-makes-the-world-go-round-with-spherical-displays/#respondThu, 10 Aug 2017 16:26:57 +0000https://www10.giscafe.com/blogs/gissusan/?p=5061Since 20o4, when Edinburgh-based Pufferfish co-founders Oliver Collier and Will Cavendish had an idea for an innovative digital display that will give a physical presence to digital content, Pufferfish has been gaining in popularity as a digital display medium of extraordinary versatility. PufferSphere is a compact, acrylic globe with on-sphere touch interactivity for the inflatable range. I saw the PufferSphere at the Esri UC in the Start-Up Gallery, and thought then what an innovative and engaging tool it would be for many geospatial uses. While other companies offer spherical display, Pufferfish has continued to increase its expertise in exclusive touch technology with professional signage range, and pushes the envelope for innovation in spherical displays and data visualization.

Pufferfish PufferSphere

GISCafe Voice: How much GIS do you use to develop the material for the globes?

We use GIS to extract and prepare geographic data with spatial attributes, translate formats and to carry out complex colouring and raw data editing.

The PufferSphere® is used to display all sorts of digital media and creative concepts including images, motion graphics, video, 360° virtual reality content, infographics and of course, global data. Even where an application is not exclusively globe-focused, our clients are often keen to incorporate globe interfaces into applications, because global data becomes extremely intuitive when shown on a native display delivering deeper levels of understanding and incredible engagement.

GISCafe Voice: What are the most common forms of installation for your product and how many are there now?

We’ve been in business for over a decade now and have established ourselves as the world leader in spherical display technology. Our displays have been installed in museums, visitor attractions, event spaces, concert venues, academic institutions, corporate offices, festivals, government buildings, art galleries, tradeshows, transport hubs and even an Olympic village!

An obvious fit for museums and visitor attractions looking to tell stories on a global scale. Science communicators and GIS professionals also use our technology worldwide, working in both research and commercial fields. GIS-based content also bleeds into many other seemingly unrelated spaces, underpinning apps we make for clients in the events sector, being included in corporate and marketing communications and augmenting experiences designed to geo-locate 360°.

With hundreds of displays now in use, we’re slowly populating the globe with little globes of our own. Our clients are located all over the world, in places as far from our HQ as Kenya and Kazakhstan.

GISCafe Voice: Do you use Esri ArcGIS or other GIS for the globe and what types of data can you use for it?

Most GIS models can be visualized spherically. This can utilise shapefiles, raster images and spreadsheets of a wide variety of types.

In addition to using GIS for offline preparation of materials for display, as an Esri Emerging Business Partner we also provide a solution that connects the PufferSphere directly with ESRI ArcGIS servers or webmaps, to display live GIS data. This can be integrated with other media to create incredible sphere applications. We recently incorporated this function into an application for the United Nations Environmental Assembly.

The live content focused on Small Island Developing States (SIDS), Air Quality Indexes and Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) with additional content reflecting the momentum for change following the Paris Climate Agreement, as well as an additional section on Climate Refugees showing the human costs of the climate change phenomena being seen around the world.

We can also use the sphere to zoom from global to localized information or do comparative analysis on local vs. global information. Any coordinate on the sphere can be used to locate a button, which can then further contextualize that location using images, text or video.

Part of the fun and the challenge in using GIS data in the creation of content for our clients, is that while we need the output to be visually striking, we also need the GIS data to help us in telling a story. For that, we use a myriad of different data because of the diversity of our client base.

The type of GIS data we utilise can vary wildly from environmental data, to weather models, to transport links, to population densities, satellite movements, shipping routes and all manner of cultural statistics. In many instances, we use geo-data to showcase a client’s global reach e.g. their locations, customer demographics etc.

GISCafe Voice: What new developments have you added in the past year and will you add more in the fall?

We’ve had a focus this past year on creating even more visually stimulating maps. We have a very talented team creating motion graphics and incorporating more GIS data filtering on globe interfaces using a new intuitive interface we call the ‘mandala’. We have additionally been working with stunning 360° 3D model ‘flythrough’ visualisations of topographical land- and cityscapes, helping us address the transition from global to local views in ways that maximize the inherent possibilities of the display. A recent addition to our team is a GIS specialist who has brought with him a wealth of additional knowledge in cartography, topology and geography.

We are constantly developing our core product, as well as building custom content for customers. Innovations over the past year have been related to spherical applications and content, ease of use, user setup, monitoring and maintenance. We plan to continue investigating the ways is which GIS data can be uniquely presented and understood by virtue of being rendered on an interactive spherical display. We look forward to exploring more in 3D in the coming year.

GISCafe Voice: Do you have different levels of products and if so, what are they? Do customers buy a globe and then subscribe to a data service? How does that work?

Our PufferSphere systems range in size from the smaller format PufferSphere 600 (2ft) screens up to the large format PufferSphere 1800 (6ft), and we have selection of interactive elements, which can be combined to create interfaces. At small sizes we offer on-sphere touch capability, and at all sizes there are options for integration with external touch screens and other systems.

We offer a full range of software to support users building their own integrations with our displays and there is a common toolset of features for graphic workflows that can be accessed and used across all displays. There are also code-based routes who want to carry out deeper level integrations with external systems via our PufferPrime API.

In practice we often work closely with our clients to provide a range of spherical content and application development services, using our unique understanding of the spherical space to bring stories to life using data, motion, video and code. These services are usually tailored to the client’s needs, expertise, existing assets, timelines and budgets.

Our approach starts with concept development, through to realisation, installation and beyond, and is designed to ensure solutions deliver functionality and value long term.

]]>https://www10.giscafe.com/blogs/gissusan/2017/08/10/puffersphere-makes-the-world-go-round-with-spherical-displays/feed/05061Boundless Desktop 1.1 Release and Partnership with Mapboxhttps://www10.giscafe.com/blogs/gissusan/2017/08/03/boundless-desktop-1-1-release-and-partnership-with-mapbox/
https://www10.giscafe.com/blogs/gissusan/2017/08/03/boundless-desktop-1-1-release-and-partnership-with-mapbox/#respondThu, 03 Aug 2017 16:03:42 +0000https://www10.giscafe.com/blogs/gissusan/?p=5047Alison Drain, product manager at Boundless, spoke with GISCafe Voice about the new product release of Boundless Desktop 1.1 and strategic partnership with Mapbox announced in July. Mapbox is a location data and mapping data platform for developers.

Through this partnership, Boundless customers can now access high-quality Mapbox basemaps within the Boundless Connect ecosystem.

According to company materials, today, Boundless Desktop users can easily access this content through the Boundless Connect plugin. Mapbox content is also accessible through Boundless Suite and Exchange subscriptions. These basemaps include:
• Mapbox Streets: A comprehensive, general-purpose basemap used for styling transit networks
• Mapbox Outdoors: A basemap with curated tilesets and specialized styling tailored for adventurous use cases such as hiking or biking
• Mapbox Light & Dark: A subtle, full-featured basemap that provides geographic context while highlighting data
• Mapbox Satellite: A full global basemap, perfect as a blank canvas or overlay
• Mapbox Satellite Streets: Combines Mapbox Satellite with vector data from Mapbox Streets, providing a comprehensive set of road, label and POI information; bringing greater clarity and context to the crisp detail in high-resolution satellite imagery
• Additional premium services for routing, geocoding and more will be available in the near future.

“This announcement (Mapbox partnership) signifies the massive growth and capabilities of Boundless Connect and accelerates the movement towards open GIS software and developer tools by expanding access to important content like Mapbox’s datasets and gorgeous maps,” said Andy Dearing, CEO of Boundless. “Partnering with Mapbox has been phenomenal and will only add value to our users. Making this data and content easily accessible through the Boundless ecosystem allows for significant productivity gains and unparalleled flexibility to our customers.”

Boundless Desktop is a cross-platform desktop GIS built upon proven open source software. Its ecosystem consists of over 600 plugins that make working with geospatial data simpler than ever before.
The release of Boundless Desktop 1.1 demonstrates company’s ongoing commitment to creating the world’s premier open GIS ecosystem. Boundless aims to continually provide customers with improvements and updates that make open GIS a viable and preferred alternative to proprietary GIS software.

Key features of Boundless Desktop 1.1 include:
• Access to premium basemap content from Mapbox made possible through a new partnership with Mapbox.
• Improved support for terrain analysis through a new toolbar that exposes common analysis techniques in a single location.
• Increased support for imagery with a new image discovery plugin. This feature enables users to conduct a quick search through image libraries and discover image scenes based on location, cloud cover, acquisition date and more. Planet’s Open California dataset will be provided as a default library, made possible through a recent partnership with Planet.
Drain had this to say about the product release of Boundless Desktop 1.1 and partnership with Mapbox:

GISCafe Voice: What does increased support for PKI Authentication mean to users?

This has important implications for a certain customer segment (DOD/IC) but not for most general users. We’ve added a plugin that makes it easier to work with PKI-protected services within QGIS, cutting down on the steps needed to work with these certificates.

GISCafe Voice: What ways do users search for imagery with the new release?

Desktop 1.1 introduces a new Image Discovery plugin, which makes it easy to search for imagery from any image catalog endpoint (local or remote) based on AOI, date acquired, off-nadir angle, cloud cover percentage, and sensor type. You can easily add your imagery provider to access image catalogs directly from QGIS.

GISCafe Voice: What abilities does the Terrain Analysis provide?

Desktop 1.1 introduces a new Terrain Analysis toolbar, which moves commonly used terrain analysis tools (hill shade, slope, viewshed, etc.) onto a single toolbar for easy access. This makes it easier to find and use tools needed for terrain analytics that were otherwise disparate and hard to find.

GISCafe Voice: What are the Premium features for the enterprise tier?

Premium subscriptions for the enterprise tier include direct access to Boundless technical support staff, our body of learning materials, and our Web App Builder for easily creating and compiling web applications from the desktop without writing any code.

We sometimes refer to content from our partners (Mapbox, Planet) as premium content. Boundless has partnered with several basemap providers, and we now include easy access basemaps via the Connect plugin. Simply keyword search for your basemap in the Connect plugin, and add it to your display to quickly get started. Desktop 1.1 loads the Mapbox Streets layer into your QGIS project by default upon startup, which makes it easy to get started with your GIS project without needing to track down data first.

Boundless Desktop 1.1 is available now. The software is free to download, and premium features are available through a subscription to Boundless Connect starting at just $4.99/month.

]]>https://www10.giscafe.com/blogs/gissusan/2017/08/03/boundless-desktop-1-1-release-and-partnership-with-mapbox/feed/05047Nearmap Provides High-Rez Oblique Imagery and 3D Products in Ready-to-Use Servicehttps://www10.giscafe.com/blogs/gissusan/2017/07/27/nearmap-provides-high-rez-oblique-imagery-and-3d-products-in-ready-to-use-service/
https://www10.giscafe.com/blogs/gissusan/2017/07/27/nearmap-provides-high-rez-oblique-imagery-and-3d-products-in-ready-to-use-service/#respondThu, 27 Jul 2017 21:28:02 +0000https://www10.giscafe.com/blogs/gissusan/?p=5011At the Esri User Conference 2017 held in San Diego this July, Australian company Nearmap announced a national survey program providing true, high-resolution oblique imagery and derivative 3-D products.

The aerial imagery company already provides cloud-based subscription access to up-to-date 2-D orthomosaic aerial imagery. Using its patented HyperCamera2 technology, Nearmap uses a fleet of airplanes, pilots, and camera systems that cover over 70% of the U.S. population three times a year to provide ortho imagery. Their business model is unique in that it provides a level of detail and scale of coverage of oblique imagery in a ready-to-use service.

Because this new camera system provides a high degree of overlap from different angles, Nearmap can reconstruct the real world in stunning detail, producing not only high-resolution orthomosaic and oblique imagery, but also surface and terrain models, natural color point clouds and textured 3-D meshes.

“This level of detail and scale of coverage of oblique imagery has never been available as a ready-to-use service for commercial and government needs until now,” said Patrick Quigley, senior vice president and general manager, U.S. of Nearmap. “The HyperCamera2 processes maps reality, by capturing the tops, sides and view angles of locations, buildings and objects, providing specific details of what’s exactly on the ground.

Nearmap VP of marketing, Tony Agresta provided additional insight into the business model: “People don’t come to us and say we’d like to pay you to fly Sacramento, because we’re always flying. We’re making the imagery available online within days of capture, so it’s automatically processed to the Amazon Cloud and made available in Esri’s or Autodesk’s products or our map browser that is our viewing tool.”

People like the consistency of Nearmap. “They can always count on us, we have a clear coverage model, flying three times a year, because we’re able to scale up and down in the Amazon Cloud depending on how much imagery we’ve captured.”

Agresta adds that Nearmap has built economies of scale to their process, and built automation into their whole process that ends up creating a very competitive price point for buyers.

Leaf off capture is done in the Spring, prior to leaves coming out. Leaf On is done in the fall. Imagery volume is high in the Spring because you have some tight windows of time. Nearmap must fly before leaves come out but also need to avoid areas with snow and always monitor weather.

So, for example, Chicago is tough to capture leaf off because the snow melt is late and weather problems could delay things. But we have been successful here and in other cities like this.

Announced at Esri UC were the two new forms of imagery offered by Nearmap: oblique imagery that is captured at between 15 and 45 degrees at an angle and gives you height on buildings. That is now being rolled out inside a product called Global Map Browser. It’s available for many U.S. cities right now. The second is derivative 3D products.

“Our commitment is to make sure we fly half the population base in the U.S. before the end of the year, and also 3D imagery which is different,” said Agresta. “These are being derived from our patented camera system, HyperCamera2, that’s actually two cameras in the plane taking numerous photographs at angles that criss cross. As we’re flying over any one location, because of the way the camera systems are architected in the plane, we’re able to snap lots of pictures which gives us a dense point cloud. There are lots of points that outline elevation changes and landscapes and all the aspects of the buildings, and then what we do is put a mesh on top of that and colorize it. That gives us, in addition to ortho and oblique, fully immersive 3D visualization or 3D models. The unique aspect of that is the user can now immerse themselves inside the 3D imagery so they can navigate through buildings and look at all details of it.”

Oblique imagery from Nearmap is seamless mosaic, which, from a user perspective, looking at it in an Esri product per Nearmap’s Map Browser, they can navigate very easily across any of the oblique imagery. There’s no wait time in terms of how it serves up and becomes available to the user. They can view it from any direction or perspective, and it’s completely stitched together and color balanced and ready to go.

Nearmap’s new website go.nearmap.com shows eight different industries using the product with government having four subcategories. Urban planning, and government urban planning involves a lot of GIS professionals.

“The value proposition here is you don’t have to requisition vehicles, or have staff onsite, or be surprised because they’re using out-of-date low-resolution satellite imagery,” said Agresta. “A city government putting in a new development has a government GISP responsible for doing the plan, and they have to put in a right-of-way and where the street is going to end, where are the sidewalks going to be, how will this be laid out, etc.”

“All of this is doable now without leaving your office, because you’ve got this 7 centimeter, consistent high resolution imagery that’s available either on your tablet or desktop. Imagine time savings if you’re a city or county person, analyzing roadways and the impact that 70 large construction cranes are having on the city at the time of events. They getting in the way of traffic, there may be pavement marking lines that have to be painted, degradation of road — all these topics are important to these events to make things run smoothly and facilitate transportation.”

For the security aspect, locations such as Washington D. C. is a district not a state, and it interfaces with neighboring cities and counties. The government and law enforcement can see the same imagery that is current and the details associated with the imagery in the form of ortho oblique coming on line with 3D.

Another example of use might be a medical emergency or public safety issue. You have an accurate picture of ground features to get people to the correct location. Other uses might be lead generation.

How Nearmap captures, manages, and delivers imagery and location is faster, according to Agresta. Some people capture 1 ft imagery or six-inch imagery. The satellite imagery from Google, Bing, or DigitalGlobe isn’t as high resolution as Nearmap’s.

“Ours is 2.8” so you’re talking about differences that are pretty dramatic,” said Agresta. “What about 1“ resolution even higher than 2.8” ? The challenge with that and with drones is scaling it. We’re flying hundreds of thousands of square miles multiple times annually and you can’t do that with drones and you can’t do that as a regional aerial provider flying over Sacramento lower in altitude and slower than we are. You can’t scale to cover hundreds of thousands of miles. So we have this right mix between coverage and resolution. Putting the model on top of it and getting into the cloud quickly is what makes it work.”

Compared with working with drones, if you fly a drone over a local area, you’ll have to do something with the imagery such as processing, and get a software product. Nearmap sees drones as complimentary to their product, not necessarily competitive.

Nearmap has a low cost usage model, so if you use it a lot you pay more, and pay less if you use it less frequently. They are a b2b high tech software company that builds its own features into their products that allow you to measure and calculate area and import KMZ files that provide additional overlays.

“Sharing your data with anyone in the world just by a single click, that’s what we’ve been promising and what we are delivering,” says Bonne. “Owners of a 3D mapping dataset, such as Mobile Mapping coverage, can now share with a single person or with many users within an organization in one quick action. This simple concept will open up vast business opportunities for every data owner.”

Still a major challenge for people in many firms is sharing access to complex datasets such as Mobile Mapping data containing multiple imagery and LiDAR point clouds amongst co-workers. This capability has been available from day one in www.3dmapping.cloud. Now you can make the same data accessible for anyone outside your organization as well as those within it. Whatever users could do on the desktop they can now do on the cloud. Transportation, telecommunications, and some government agencies are eager to use this technology, so that they can utilize it within many departments within one organization.

The possibilities for demonstration, collaboration, delivery, data integration extend exponentially. And the best part is, the Belgian OrbitGT does not charge anything for this, whatever the relation between data owner and data user is.

Bonne said OrbitGT offers a broad portfolio of Mobile Mapping products: two desktop products and a server side product. “For the desktop we have a portfolio for the mobile mapping business from A to Z, and we work with all the hardware vendors. For people who go mapping and collecting data there is the Mobile Mapping Content Manager for the desktop.”

Their feature extraction product includes a variety of offerings, from low and to high end. Those products are aimed at people who want to extract actionable data from the raw data that comes from mobile mapping, imagery and point cloud. It is typically the data collected by the mobile mapping system, but not everybody can work with the cloud images.

“They are nice to look at but you can’t measure them,” said Bonne. “But we make it possible for however you collect data, you can extract anything you need. That’s all feature extraction, also a desktop product, sold by seat and license.”

Their product, Publisher, is a tool served on your server from which you can publish Mobile Mapping contents to the internet, your mobile phone or to a SDK that you can integrate with an existing workflow. You install on premise. The new product, 3dmapping.cloud is similar but based in the cloud. You simply type in the web address, and sign in, and it works immediately.

3dmapping.cloud is based on a SAAS business model, and is very reasonably priced. It eliminates the challenges of an IT department and works the same way as familiar cloud services from Autodesk, Esri, Adobe, and Microsoft Office 365.

Bonne says OrbitGT is the first company to make a generic access to the data you are collecting, and they support not only the standard vendors but also those supporting a tailor-made system.

If a company changes to a different system for their main software, they can use the same workflow and software with the new system and 3dmapping.cloud. They don’t want to change software when they change providers.

LiDAR lacks support of the industry but is great for precision and making measurement and converting it to mobile, on the other hand. With the imagery much more accessible now, suddenly mobile mapping data is not only for engineers but for tens of thousands of users.

That combination is very valuable. For owners, there is the mapping precision and measurable information. Google Streetview is good for a search engine, but for people who need to do a real job they need up-to-date and accurate imagery, that comes with mobile mapping. Just as we have now for aerial mapping, and aerial coverage every 3-5 years for the past 20 years. With mobile mapping coverage can be done more than once a year.

Join now on www.3dmapping.cloud. You must be a registered user to access the sharing capabilities. The website details the pricing.

]]>https://www10.giscafe.com/blogs/gissusan/2017/06/19/orbitgt-announces-mobile-mapping-cloud-platform-3dmapping-cloud/feed/04948Boundless Announces Suite 4.10 and Strategic Partnership with Planethttps://www10.giscafe.com/blogs/gissusan/2017/06/14/boundless-announces-suite-4-10-and-strategic-partnership-with-planet/
https://www10.giscafe.com/blogs/gissusan/2017/06/14/boundless-announces-suite-4-10-and-strategic-partnership-with-planet/#respondThu, 15 Jun 2017 00:36:20 +0000https://www10.giscafe.com/blogs/gissusan/?p=4940Andy Dearing, CEO of Boundless, discussed the announcement of Boundless Suite 4.10 release that has been their flagship product since the inception of the company. Dearing also talked about the company’s strategic partnership with Planet.

4.9 was released last year. In the new release, Dearing says that they have incorporated MapBox styling within their platforms, leveraging that powerful styling engine and code, and are able to bring those files into their Platform. “Typically, our technical GeoServer had a styling and rendering engine based in XML,” said Dearing. “We’re able to write a more powerful styling capability with this platform.”

For their developer community, Boundless has released the Boundless SDK, a web SDK toolkit that sits on top of their visualization platform, providing open layers for developers to quickly develop web applications from their webmaps or data. In addition, there are new contributions to the community release of GeoServer. The Boundless platform is built upon open source technology and open APIs that generate actionable location intelligence across third party apps, content services and plug-ins for enterprise applications.

GeoServer 2.11 is a community OS project whose latest version includes lower load times, enabling users to load data and bring it forward, which is especially valuable to those with large datasets. Load times are reduced to a fraction of their previous time. In addition, the Geoserver is cross functional with other data formats such as Esri shapefile, etc.

Key features of Boundless Suite 4.10 include (from company materials):

Support on the CentOS 7 operating system, giving users outside of the Windows ecosystem access to the comprehensive open GIS solution.

Leverage modern symbology styles with Mapbox Styles as mentioned above, a modern way to style that is designed to work with the entire Boundless product platform. Users can use this feature across desktop, mobile and web.

Designed to work in modern IT architectures including virtual machines, elastic DevOps architectures and the cloud, allowing customers to maximize their GIS investment and lower Total ownership costs.

The Boundless new SDK ships with Boundless Suite 4.10 and enables users to use the OpenLayers 3 library that utilizes the React framework. The SDK powers the web application builder in Boundless Desktop so users can create applications now without generating any code.

Boundless Suite 4.10 ships with GeoServer 2.11, with improved loading and OGC request times for large installations. Tens of thousands of layers can now be managed in GeoServer at faster load times. Greater EPSG support and improved identification and handling of obscure .prj files and directories of shapefiles are among the features.

Boundless has an ideas portal ideas@boundless.com for users to share their ideas in a public forum. These ideas help shape the next release of products.

Boundless’ strategic partnership with Planet enables the company to wire the Planet API directly into their API, aiming for a seamless experience for the users to access, discover and work with Planet imagery, directly in Boundless’ platform and services. Customers will be able to access the large library of Planet high quality imagery and fast loading imagery basemaps residing in the Boundless Connect ecosystem.

The National Geospatial Intelligence Agency made an investment in geospatial tools and Planet, as well as agriculture, providing access to data that wasn’t available before but is now available in the Open Source platform.

“We provide access to the Planet API for our desktop subscribers, and even our enterprise support customers, so anyone can register with Boundless Connect which is our ecosystem. Once you have a login you can download our desktop plan free version and gain access to free Planet imagery, as well as a free basemap,” said Dearing. “If you’re a Premium Planet customer, your organization has access to their daily takes and deeper archives over certain areas of the world.”

The partnership with Planet will make it possible to access (from company materials):

]]>https://www10.giscafe.com/blogs/gissusan/2017/06/14/boundless-announces-suite-4-10-and-strategic-partnership-with-planet/feed/04940Imagery Collection from Any Moving Vehicle with New NCTech 360-Degree Camera for Google Street Viewhttps://www10.giscafe.com/blogs/gissusan/2017/05/24/imagery-collection-from-any-moving-vehicle-with-new-nctech-360-degree-camera-for-google-street-view/
https://www10.giscafe.com/blogs/gissusan/2017/05/24/imagery-collection-from-any-moving-vehicle-with-new-nctech-360-degree-camera-for-google-street-view/#respondWed, 24 May 2017 17:22:51 +0000https://www10.giscafe.com/blogs/gissusan/?p=4905Neil Tocher, CTO at Edinburgh, Scotland-based NCTech, reality imaging systems developer, spoke with GISCafeVoice about NCTech’s recent demonstration of a new 360-degree camera designed to be mounted on any vehicle in order to capture and generate virtual street-level imagery.

NCTech Street View camera on vehicle

Google is set to trial the new camera for Street View capture in three countries (not currently announced). Details of the new product were presented at the recent Google Street View Summit 2017 in Tokyo.

According to company materials, with a 360 x 300 degree field of view, the new camera captures data at five frames per second to produce 60 megapixel spherical images. The Street View auto ready camera is designed to collect data from any moving vehicle for Google’s Street View platform and other platforms. The new camera will be available in Q4 2017.

Close view of the NCTech VRC

Google wants to increase the volume and frequency of data uploaded to Street View and NCTech’s new camera combines futuristic tech and accessible design with low cost, to help achieve that goal. NCTech’s ultimate goal is to increase the 10 million miles per year currently available online to one billion miles per year.

The new camera utilizes Intel technology and will be the first to adopt NCTech’s Intelligent Capture System, a cloud-based system that talks to each camera, ensuring that the data collected is unique and manages disk space on the camera.

NCTech Street View camera at sunset

“With this product, we’re making use of the very latest Intel Apollo Lake processor technology.” said Tocher. “Intel have worked very closely with us to ensure the product realizes all the potential benefits provided by this new chipset for ultrafast street-level virtualization.”

NCTech also announced a second new Street View compatible product, the VRC (Virtual Reality Camera). The new low-cost consumer camera will provide 3D virtualization of interior places, capturing 360-degree images and depth, allowing viewers to explore in full immersive virtual reality.

“The VRC is the first affordable consumer Virtual Reality Camera. It will help democratize virtual reality by making the capture of user generated 3D VR content easy and abundant,” said Tocher. “The VRC’s Street View API compatibility now enables anyone to be able to share their virtualized places on Street View.”GISCafe Voice: Is this camera specifically designed for Google and Street View?

NCTech VRC in the workplace in office with coffee

iSTAR Pulsar was not designed exclusively for Google but they have some very specific and ambitious plans, so ensuring we delivered a product that met their needs was paramount. It was quite a natural step for us, as we were frequently asked whether our iSTAR Fusion camera can be mounted on a vehicle, but is designed for use as a static 360-degree camera for rapid HDR colour capture in terrestrial laser scanning.

GISCafe Voice: Has Google entered into partnerships with NCTech before? If so, what are they?

We have had a relationship with Google’s Street View team for quite a few years and knew the key people there before they were part of Google. Our first iris360 camera was released in 2015 in conjunction with Google and was designed to meet the needs of their ‘Street View | Trusted’ photographers, who are commissioned by owners of shops, restaurants, bars etc to image their premises for hosting on Street View. Google’s ‘Street View ready’ programme is building on this and encompassing different data structures beyond 360.

GISCafe Voice:What countries will get the pilots?

During our pilot stage over the coming months, neither Google or NCTech will be revealing the countries and cities that are part of the Street View data collection initiative.

[Note that it will be more than three countries]

GISCafe Voice: What use cases do you see for this camera?

iSTAR Pulsar is specifically tuned for capturing streams of 360-degree images and running automatically for long periods, without needing manual interaction. While Street View is clearly a very significant catalyst of this product’s development, the camera is also intended for other companies looking to perform the same kind of capture. This could be other tech firms looking to build out their own digital platforms, or existing users of this kind of mobile mapping technology, such as GIS professionals. We expect the latter will benefit greatly from this new market expansion in terms of reduced costs and increased options when it comes to selecting a mobile mapping product.

GISCafe Voice: With the Intelligent Capture System, does it let you know when the disk is full?

Yes. The ICS is in communication with the iSTAR Pulsar during data collection and provides feedback to the user on its status. But the ICS also goes much further and provides proactive information on where to collect and how to maximize the user’s collection efficiency.

GISCafe Voice:How does the Intel Apollo Lake technology factor in?

This provides us with a low-power, low-heat chipset with superior processing speed to compute the vast collection of data for long periods. Intel have worked very closely with us to ensure that we benefit from all the potential of their latest technologies.

GISCafe Voice: How do you see the VRC camera impacting the market?

The new ‘Street View ready’ program changes Street View in two dramatic ways. Firstly it builds on the ‘Street View | Trusted’ model where individuals do the capture, not Google directly. This eliminates the logistical limits of geographic reach and frequency of capture. When your ambition is to digitize the planet, it’s a lot easier when you have the planet working with you. Google are one of the few companies who could set up a model like this and mobilize enough support to make it work.

The second change is that Street View is no longer just 360 imagery. Google are incorporating VR technologies to enhance the experience. Imagine what that means – not just spinning that 360 photo around to get a basic sense of what that street or restaurant looks like. We’re talking about leveraging the mass adoption of mobile and VR technology to put you right there. This means an expansion from 360 images into true VR content, and this ultimately requires 3D depth.

In both of these respects the VRC has a significant impact. It is first and foremost a virtual reality camera (hence the name) that combines 360-degree images with 3D depth sensing, and we are aiming for a purchase price starting at $500 to make high quality VR capture technology as accessible as possible.

GISCafe Voice: Do you see the VRC camera as disruptive technology as in being used in place of 3D laser scanning, and if so where and how?

We believe that the VRC has the potential to facilitate a mass disruption in the 3D scanning and reality capture industries, but do we think this disruption will cut across the need for GIS and AEC professionals to use survey grade technology? That is unlikely, but we hope it will open up new application areas for which using kit costing tens of thousands of dollars is too expensive. From $500, the VRC is cheap enough for everyone to explore new ways of doing things, and we are excited to see how creative people can be with it.

]]>https://www10.giscafe.com/blogs/gissusan/2017/05/24/imagery-collection-from-any-moving-vehicle-with-new-nctech-360-degree-camera-for-google-street-view/feed/04905DigitalGlobe Announces Agreement with Rise Broadbandhttps://www10.giscafe.com/blogs/gissusan/2017/05/17/digitalglobe-announces-agreement-with-rise-broadband/
https://www10.giscafe.com/blogs/gissusan/2017/05/17/digitalglobe-announces-agreement-with-rise-broadband/#respondWed, 17 May 2017 18:43:50 +0000https://www10.giscafe.com/blogs/gissusan/?p=4898DigitalGlobe, Inc. this week announced an agreement to provide elevation data to Rise Broadband, a fixed wireless internet service provider (WISP), to enable faster and more efficient deployment of wireless internet services in the United States.

Kreg Barrett, DigitalGlobe’s director of North America Sales, spoke with GISCafe Voice about the announcement, whereby DigitalGlobe will provide Rise Broadband with Vricon’s high-resolution Digital Surface Model (DSM) data, to verify fixed wireless broadband service availability to household and businesses in specific market areas before sending installation teams into the field. The products are elevation models created via a joint venture between Vricon (elevation products), EGS Technologies and DigitalGlobe’s satellite imagery, and will provide Rise with the ability to enhance the performance of its fixed wireless coverage prediction tools.

DigitalGlobe has 15 years of experience archiving their elevation data, based on their high resolution commercially available satellite imagery. Using their global library the company can built out through working with an ecosystem of partners who build elevation models.

“Rise is a fixed broadband wireless company (WISPS), and they have an array of tower locations in sixteen states,” said Barrett. “They broadcast high speed internet wireless signals from their towers. A receiver is needed on a house to harness a signal to bring high speed internet to those homes. In order to most effectively determine who has access to tower location, Rise Broadband are using these digital elevation models to do a ViewCad analysis, which asks the question, ‘show me all areas around me that have clear line-of -sight (from towers) using data.’ Once they can identify clear line-of-sight, they can then receive that signal and bring the high speed wireless broadband into that house.”

EGS Technologies, a channel partner for DigitalGlobe, has been serving the wireless community for over 20 years, and brings geodata and other solutions to companies like Rise.

Development in Kenya is hampered by the mountainous terrain of a remote site. Elevation data enhanced with road-flattening enables the project team to identify the best routes and to efficiently plan transportation.Photo courtesy DigitalGlobe, Inc.

While elevation data has been around for a long time, what makes this dataset and technology really relevant for telecommunications, for public safety, wireless and broadband is DigitalGlobe is able to produce more accurate resolute data at scale, at a very competitive price point, said Barrett.

“We’re able to provide much more detail in this data that covers a wider area,” he said. “Traditionally the more accurate data has been reserved for urban cores, downtown areas, because there hasn’t been a need to model with high-resolution data in suburbia and rural areas. Now with the advent of fixed wireless broadband or the network densification situation or modeling with small cells looking forward to 5G, there’s going to be a need for high-resolution data outside the urban core. To support future technology like autonomous vehicles, remote surgery and billions of connected devices, and IoT, this data will allow people to model at a much more detailed model level because these technologies are going to require it. It will ultimately save these companies time and effort sending people into the field to do manual testing. This data will allow them to make a more accurate desktop plan and to be more efficient when they go out to build their network. The more accurate the data is, the less time people spend in the field.”

There are a few use cases where this data really applies, said Barret. One is this view shed concept that Rise is employing, from a fixed point tens or hundreds of meters above ground. ‘Show me everywhere that has clear line-of-sight back to that point.’ Within the established wireless networks today there is a significant microwave backhaul needed to offload data from the network where fiber isn’t available or not practical, so microwave is a line-of-sight technology. There can be no blockages between radios employing microwave in order for that downlink to be successful.

“Our data is used in those circumstances with microwave engineers looking to establish clear line-of-sight between two points. A typical use case for this data is in the wireless industry,” said Barrett.

The other use case is for RF modeling. The RAN and RF engineers are looking for an optimal place to put a cell site to maximize coverage and fill in white spaces in the network. They will use elevation data, or clutter data – a subset of elevation data – to determine what the building, trees or the vegetation, goes into a signal absorption algorithm, “to determine where can I place radio to minimize interference and optimize the network so no one will experience latency while watching video, etc.,” Barrett said.

The upshot of this agreement truly will result in highly accurate location intelligence datasets that make it possible for telecom and broadband companies to deploy services faster and provide better service to their customers.

]]>https://www10.giscafe.com/blogs/gissusan/2017/05/17/digitalglobe-announces-agreement-with-rise-broadband/feed/04898Harness the Power of Data in Politics, Health, Finance and Navigationhttps://www10.giscafe.com/blogs/gissusan/2017/05/11/harness-the-power-of-data-in-politics-health-finance-and-navigation/
https://www10.giscafe.com/blogs/gissusan/2017/05/11/harness-the-power-of-data-in-politics-health-finance-and-navigation/#respondThu, 11 May 2017 18:52:26 +0000https://www10.giscafe.com/blogs/gissusan/?p=4890Erek Dyskant, co-founder of BlueLabs, an analytics and technology company dedicated to harnessing the power of data to produce meaningful two-way engagement between people and organizations, aims to empower individuals to take steps that “make their political voice heard, improve their health, and strengthen their financial security.”

Sevenhugs Smart Remote

As lead of the BlueLabs healthcare & public sector practice, Dyskant has transformed government agencies and large healthcare organizations to take a data-driven evidence-based approach to engaging with their constituents, where the experience is streamlined and everyone receives the information that is proven to help them take the next step.

Before co-founding BlueLabs, Dyskant led the geospatial analytics team at Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign, where he developed the geospatial algorithms necessary to make 25 million effective, relevant, voter contacts in 4 days.

As has been pointed out at other events, the success of self-driving vehicles is reliant on teaching the cars how to be drivers, which means they will need to be personalized and connected. Artificial intelligence and wireless communications that enable in-car, personal experiences were showcased, as well as how cars may be able to talk to other cars, and how cars monitor what’s going on in their surroundings for improved safety on the road.

On the topic of self-driving vehicles, Frits van der Schaff, Head of Automotive, Esri and staff spoke at CES earlier this year about mapping and spatial analytics that provides spatial geospatial context to foster safety and improve the overall driver experience. Microsoft staff showcased future scenarios where artificial intelligence bots can aid in improving driver safety, engagement, and integration with calendars and personal preferences.

Sevenhugs Smart Remote

Have you ever wished you could use a remote to operate more than just your television screen?

Indoor positioning offering Sevenhugs Smart Remote, connects to a proprietary indoor positioning system that uses sensors to triangulate its location and other connected devices it is aimed at. So, that it could be aimed at a TV and may bring up an app like streaming video. You could point it at your TV, and a Roku menu will appear. Embodied with contextual awareness, this Smart Remote could interface with over 25,000 connected devices in your home. You may aim it a a lamp and get an app interface with multiple options. The contextual awareness embodied in Smart Remote could simplify the concepts of smart home awareness with the push button gadget. The product won three Best of Show awards at CES 2017.

Drivers can rest assured they no longer need to connect to a computer to get the latest maps and software updates, with the TomTom GO 52. All they have to do is connect their smartphones and the new TomTom GO 52 will read aloud smartphone notifications from SMS and iMessage, designed also for hands-free calls for drivers to stay connected. It also has voice activation capability with Siri and Google Now.

According to company materials: “We are excited to be bringing Wi-Fi to our mid-range products, making it easier for our customers to get the latest updates and keep them moving. The new TomTom GO 52 is packed full with innovative features. We are helping drivers to stay connected to their smartphone while limiting the distraction from it when in the car. We want to help make journeys safer,” says Corinne Vigreux, co-founder and managing director, TomTom Consumer.

Available in 5” touchscreen, the new TomTom GO 52 comes with Lifetime TomTom Traffic and Lifetime Map updates.

The new TomTom GO 52 will be available in stores in the U.S. at the end of May 2017 at $179.99.

Earth Networks reports that it operates the world’s largest network of weather sensors, and its Total Lightning Network is the most extensive and technologically-advanced lightning network in the world.

Oil & Gas, Construction, government, energy and other weather-sensitive industries are taking advantage of advanced weather data analytics for safe site surveying and inspection with UAVs; and to protects their assets during severe weather events.

GISCafe Voice:What do you mean by “Advanced weather data?”

Advanced weather data is differentiated from other weather observations in terms of temporal and spatial granularity. Our weather sensing network updates every 2 seconds and measurements are taken from within hyperlocal, highly populated areas where the data can drive commercial or public concern decisions. On top of this, our lightning detection network is the largest in the world, with over 1,500 sensors measuring real-time lightning in over 90 countries. Earth Networks not only measures these weather and lightning events, but then creates predictive analytics to help companies plan for disruptions and to provide increased lead time to public entities to protect the public.

GISCafe Voice: How do businesses in Oil & Gas, Construction, government, energy and other weather-sensitive industries leverage advanced weather data analytics for safe site surveying and inspection with UAVs; better response to disasters and emergencies; and protecting their significant investments in drone/UAV assets?

We’ll have to answer this one a bit generically. We don’t have anyone using the data in the drone space right now. That said, here is our position:

These industries all rely on Earth Networks now to safeguard assets from severe weather. For example, energy companies build outage models utilizing their real-time hourly forecasting for every point in the country. These companies can then plan field teams accordingly, and also plan drone operations to be conducted after the weather event to assess infrastructure damage that may have occurred. By storing site surveys and historical weather data, companies can gain insight into how weather patterns are affecting their projects and critical assets.

GISCafe Voice: What types of geospatial solutions do you use for this? Is it proprietary, something you build in house or are contracting?

We have a SaaS geospatial solution called Sferic Maps, leveraging technology from MapBox. In the offering, which is also mobile-enabled, customers can create custom map layers by pasting GeoJSON onto the map. Customers use this to depict the locations of their critical assets, visualize when weather patterns will intersect with those assets, and setup customized predictive alerts that can be sent to personnel managing those assets.

GISCafe Voice:What kinds of new approaches are you using in order to achieve advanced weather data?

We are continually integrating new datasets, sensors, and methodologies into our offerings. We forecast several types of conditions beyond temperature and precipitation. We also include solar insolence, wet bulb globe temperature, radial ice accumulation, and horizontal ice accumulation. All of these measures are used in various industries to manage potentially dangerous situations.

GISCafe Voice: Where are the weather sensors located and what are they tracking exactly?

Our 12,000+ sensors are generally located at school sites and within highly populated communities. They are tracking various measurements such as temperature, humidity, wind speed, pressure, solar insolence, and precipitation. Our 1,500+ lightning sensors are detecting lightning flashes and strikes that either hit the ground (cloud-to-ground), or occur within clouds (in-cloud). In-cloud detection is unique as it is precursor to severe weather events, and generally precedes cloud-to-ground strikes.

GISCafe Voice: Can the weather data analytics analyze data patterns and make predictions from them as to safe alternatives for people?

Yes, this is core to what we do at Earth Networks. Our weather and lightning sensors bring observations in that are used as primary inputs into our predictive algorithms. The output of these algorithms are forecasts across several variables (such as those cited in #4,5 above) that companies use to automate their decision-making processes to protect their assets and people.

]]>https://www10.giscafe.com/blogs/gissusan/2017/05/04/advanced-weather-data-from-earth-networks-helps-save-critical-assets/feed/04881Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 – Looking to the Future, Aircraft Tracking with Space-Based Satelliteshttps://www10.giscafe.com/blogs/gissusan/2017/04/20/malaysia-airlines-flight-370-looking-to-the-future-aircraft-tracking-with-space-based-satellites/
https://www10.giscafe.com/blogs/gissusan/2017/04/20/malaysia-airlines-flight-370-looking-to-the-future-aircraft-tracking-with-space-based-satellites/#respondThu, 20 Apr 2017 13:25:26 +0000https://www10.giscafe.com/blogs/gissusan/?p=4868One of the biggest mysteries that still remains unsolved is what happened to Malaysian Airlines Flight 370, that took off from Kuala Lumpur International Airport on March 8, 2014, just after midnight local time.

The flight should have landed safely in Beijing, and yet it vanished somewhere over the Indian Ocean, with pieces of wreckage strewn as far as India and retrieved long afterward. The disappearance spawned a search spanning years and cost millions of dollars, and still remains a mystery. The hull of the plane has never been recovered.

This week, Malaysia Airlines announced it is the first airline to begin tracking all its aircraft with space-based satellites. Three companies partnering to provide this service include Aireon, FlightAware and SITAOnAir, who jointly pronounced the technology will allow the airline to have “minute-by-minute, 100% global, flight-tracking data” for all flights. Under the agreement, all Malaysia Airlines aircraft will gain access to minute-by-minute global flight tracking data delivered by Sitaonair’s Aircom FlightTracker.

It would seem that with the level of technology and science available that this type of tragedy would be preventable or at least the mystery as to why it happened solved in 2014. However, minute-by-minute space-based satellite data may be able to prevent such catastrophic events in the future and at less cost than other tracking options.

FlightAware founder and chief executive Daniel Baker stated in a video: “For the first time ever, airlines will be able to track their airplanes even in places that aren’t served by current satellite constellations – and it doesn’t matter if they’re flying over the ocean, if it’s over the desert, if it’s over the North Pole: We’ll know where the plane is.”

The system enhances the Aircom FlightTracker by Aireon’s space-based Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) data to the existing data from FlightAware’s global sources, complementing active Air Navigation Service Provider (ANSP) Future Air Navigation System (FANS) activity data, according to AIN Online.

By incorporating the data, Malaysia Airlines’ aircraft operations center will receive real-time position updates of its airborne fleet globally. Aireon’s space-based ADS-B data will also resolve any existing data feed coverage gaps that remain, particularly over oceanic and remote airspace, where no surveillance currently exists.

The service requires no new avionics or aircraft modifications.

“With the addition of the Aireon data, via FlightAware, to Sitaonair’s Aircom FlightTracker, combined with our active monitoring and automated alerting capabilities, Malaysia Airlines will be at the cutting edge of real-time flight-tracking technology,” said Sitaonair’s Aircom portfolio director, Paul Gibson. “With access to up-to-the-minute reporting, Malaysia Airlines will know the location, heading, speed and altitude of all aircraft in its fleet, at all times, and be alerted to any exceptions.

Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 was the object of a multinational search for wreckage over 46,000 square miles of the Indian Ocean. The search cost over $150 million and was called off just this January, 2017, after it was concluded that there was insufficient evidence gathered as to where or why the plane had crashed. A few months after this tragedy, another Malaysia Airlines aircraft, Flight 17, was shot down by a missile over eastern Ukraine, while traveling from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur. Killed in the crash were all 283 passengers, including many children.

Complicating matters for Flight 370 was the fact that the transponder stopped working so there was no contact with the aircraft at all. Investigators don’t know whether the transponder was tampered with or simply failed. This left a large window of time in which the plane was untraceable.

With the service offered by Aireon, which was in development long before the Flight 370 tragedy, space-based flight tracking signal the moment the beacon from the transponder was turned off, and know exactly where that occurred. “Then you can pinpoint where to begin searching,” said Aireon chief executive Don Thoma.

Other advantages of Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcast (ADS-B) technology is that planes could fly better routes more directly from Point A to Point B, which would save time, money and reduce carbon emissions.

In preparation, the first 10 Iridium NEXT satellites carrying the Aireon ADS-B hosted payload launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket January 14, 2017. 66 operational low-earth-orbit satellites to provide global coverage will comprise the constellation. Aireon expects its service to go into operation next year, once the Iridium NEXT satellite constellation has been completed. The service will also provide air navigation service providers with global aircraft surveillance capability and enable more efficient flight paths.

The Federal Aviation Administration is embracing real-time ADS-B for air traffic control and dropping radar, and by 2020, ADS-B equipment will be required in planes to fly in most controlled airspace. Other aviation agencies worldwide are exploring this same approach.

The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) was galvanized after the Malaysia Airlines tragedy, into adopting new regulations that among other mandates, required any aircraft that is in trouble to report its location to air traffic control every minute automatically. According to ICAO, the new rules will take effect by 2021.